A DENTIST jailed for seven years for a £1.4 million NHS fraud had been investigated twice before by health chiefs – but was allowed to carry on working in the industry.

A DENTIST jailed for seven years for a £1.4 million NHS fraud had been investigated twice before by health chiefs – but was allowed to carry on working in the industry.

Joyce Trail submitted more than 7,000 fake invoices for bogus dental work, including the fitting of false teeth for 120 care home ‘patients’ who were actually dead.

Yesterday the designer shoe collecting dentist was jailed for the huge fraud, committed through her Handsworth surgery over three years.

Her daughter Nyri Sterling, 33, was also jailed for two years after she was found guilty of conspiracy to defraud while working as administrator at the Hamstead Road practice.

And today the Birmingham Mail can reveal how Trail, 50, had twice been investigated about her financial claims to the NHS Dental Services.

But the holiday-loving crook was allowed to continue in her job by health chiefs after claiming she had misunderstood invoicing rules – and agreed to pay back the cash.

Victoria Jones was one of the West Midlands Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) lawyers who brought church-going Trail to justice.

Complex Casework Unit Senior Crown Prosecutor Ms Jones said: “She had been looked at by the NHS Dental Services prior to us getting involved and been forced to pay back a lot of money.

“In 2004 I think she had to pay back about £327,642 which was overpaid to her.

‘‘In 2006 Dr Trail was investigated further by NHS Dental Services following a rapid rise in claims for dentures.

“She claimed she didn’t understand the new provisions that had come in, she was claiming for things she thought she was able to.

“In essence she was not prosecuted in any way, shape or form because it was dealt with internally by the NHS Dental Services.

“They accepted her explanation that she’d misunderstood the procedure but they still made her pay the money back.’’ Yet despite the two runs-in with health bosses, Trail embarked on her most elaborate fraud in 2006 by taking advantage of a new way dentists were paid by the NHS.

Ms Jones said: “In April 2006 the payment system changed to what’s called a ‘unit of dental activity’.

“So for fitting a denture a dentist could claim 12 units of dental activity which is the most that you could claim. If it was just a filling it would be three units. She was paid a fixed amount per unit, so the more dentures she said she did the more she got paid.”

Over three years Trail submitted fake invoices for dental work never carried out after carefully targeting elderly care homes in Birmingham and beyond for suitable ‘patients’.

Ms Jones said: “The way that they were getting their details is that they would canvass nursing homes in the Birmingham area and up around the Manchester and Nottingham areas. So they would ring up a nursing home and say ‘Do you want us to come and do a domiciliary visit?’, which is basically when the dentist goes out to nursing homes. They would also say, ‘And if so, can you send us a list of your patients and their details?’

“They would sometimes go and do the visits but wouldn’t treat everybody at the home. More often what they would do is to take the names and details and just submit the claims for people without ever having treated them.

“And sometimes people were dead because the nursing homes’ lists wouldn’t be up to date.

“Or they would get a name from a nursing home and submit a claim when that person was still alive. That person would subsequently die – but they’d reuse the name three, four, five times.’’

A total of around 60 care homes were targeted by Trail, with more than half in the West Midlands.

At the height of the fraud she was earning £650,000 a year, which helped pay for a £1.25 million home in Little Aston.

She also enjoyed regular luxury holidays abroad, including to the Caribbean, St Tropez and Miami – where she would enjoy shopping sprees for designer Cartier jewellery, Prada clothes and Jimmy Choo shoes. Investigations into the fraud began in 2008 and a file was passed to West Midlands CPS in 2009.

Ms Jones said: “At that stage we couldn’t show that she was conspiring with anybody so they were just ‘stand alone’ fraud charges.

“The file then came to me and straightaway the initial thought was, ‘Oh my goodness, this is huge’ and where is everything?

“In the end we literally had to get the paperwork shipped up from London where the NHS Protect office is. I think it virtually filled a room. They were split into the patient record cards, the claim forms, and fake lab dockets.

“When NHS Protect investigators started looking into it, there were patients who were private, so she should never have claimed for them.

“There were people who didn’t wear dentures so she shouldn’t have claimed for them, people who’d died, people who had moved, people who weren’t there at the time.

“So that’s when it started unravelling.”

Trail’s career is now in ruins – although her contract with the NHS was only terminated in July.

She also faces losing her home in a Proceeds of Crime confiscation case, a house crammed with luxury goods, including watches, jewellery and around 100 pairs of shoes.

Ms Jones said: “We had photographs of her wardrobe which was walk-in, three sides of the room shelved, handbags, shoes floor to ceiling. We had a lot of her bank statements. Her payments on foreign expenditure, luxury goods were absolutely enormous.”

Dr Ros Hamburger, Consultant in Dental Public Health for NHS Birmingham and Solihull, said: “Dr Trail deliberately defrauded the NHS out of a substantial sum of money that should have been spent on dental care for people in Birmingham.

“We have strengthened our contracting and commissioning process to make sure this does not happen again.

“We routinely identify and challenge dental practices over unusual or unexpected patterns of treatment. We have also established strong working relationships with the Care Quality Commission and routinely share intelligence on practices.”